Category Archives: Philosophy

Science-fiction stories and movies are not only entertainment for a rainy day but also mirrors of the scientific abilities, ambitions, even anxieties of a society. A short overview about tales and movies shows this evolution. The decade of 1950 to … Continue reading →

Somebody somewhere at this moment is writing a reverential essay about Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic. I feel a little ungenerous, I admit, to write in less than enthusiastic tones. It seems to me though that if the land ethic, Leopold’s … Continue reading →

As students of science we have all, no doubt, absorbed the lessons from the history of our disciplines that changes in thinking tend not to be meted out incrementally. The Darwinian and Wallacean account of evolutionary change through natural selection … Continue reading →

In the introductory chapter of his helpful Introduction to Phenomenology Robert Sokolowski reports on the genesis of his book project in a lunchtime conversation with a professor of mathematics and philosophy who reported on the following significant difference between mathematicians … Continue reading →

This post is part of a series of occasional posts concerning the body and ecology. I start somewhat circuitously by examining the body in the work of Kant. Friedrich Nietzsche, in tones braggadocio, prefaced his intellectual autobiography, Ecce Homo: How … Continue reading →

Reposted from Evolving Thoughts At this point it might be well to insert a fact that has generally been overlooked by the historians of biology. The pre-evolutionary concept of species is generally given as a universally accepted view that species … Continue reading →

I’m an alien I’m a legal alien I’m an Englishman in Nürnberg Being an English historian of mathematics resident in Germany I have been often asked, over the years, by people who know a little about the history of mathematics, … Continue reading →